According the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (UN FAO), the world's population will exceed 9.6 billion people by the year 2050, which will require significant improvements in agriculture to meet growing food demands. At the same time, conservation of resources (such as water, land), reduction of inputs (such as fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides), environmental sustainability, and climate change are increasingly important factors in how food is grown. There is a need for improved agricultural plants and farming practices that will enable the need for a nearly doubled food production with fewer resources, more environmentally sustainable inputs, and with plants with improved responses to various biotic and abiotic stresses (such as pests, drought, disease).
Today, crop performance is optimized primarily via technologies directed towards the interplay between crop genotype (e.g., plant breeding, genetically-modified (GM) crops) and its surrounding environment (e.g., fertilizer, synthetic herbicides, pesticides). While these paradigms have assisted in doubling global food production in the past fifty years, yield growth rates have stalled in many major crops and shifts in the climate have been linked to production instability and declines in important crops, driving an urgent need for novel solutions to crop yield improvement. In addition to their long development and regulatory timelines, public fears of GM-crops and synthetic chemicals have challenged their use in many key crops and countries, resulting in a lack of acceptance for many GM traits and the exclusion of GM crops and many synthetic chemistries from some global markets. Thus, there is a significant need for innovative, effective, environmentally-sustainable, and publically-acceptable approaches to improving the yield and resilience of crops to stresses.
Improvement of crop resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses has proven challenging for conventional genetic and chemical paradigms for crop improvement. This challenge is in part due to the complex, network-level changes that arise during exposure to these stresses. For example, plants under stress can succumb to a variety of physiological and developmental damages, including dehydration, elevated reactive oxygen species, impairment of photosynthetic carbon assimilation, inhibition of translocation of assimilates, increased respiration, reduced organ size due to a decrease in the duration of developmental phases, disruption of seed development, and a reduction in fertility.
Like humans, who utilize a complement of beneficial microbial symbionts, plants have been purported to derive a benefit from the vast array of bacteria and fungi that live both within and around their tissues in order to support the plant's health and growth. Endophytes are symbiotic organisms (typically bacteria or fungi) that live within plants, and inhabit various plant tissues, often colonizing the intercellular spaces of host leaves, stems, flowers, fruits, seeds, or roots. To date, a small number of symbiotic endophyte-host relationships have been analyzed in limited studies to provide fitness benefits to model host plants within controlled laboratory settings, such as enhancement of biomass production and nutrition, increased tolerance to stress such as drought and pests. There is still a need to develop better plant-endophyte systems to confer benefits to a variety of agriculturally-important plants such as maize and soybean, for example to provide improved yield and tolerance to the environmental stresses present in many agricultural situations for such agricultural plants.
There are very few examples of “complex endophytes”, or endophytes further comprising another component (such as a virus, or a bacterium), that have been described in the literature, including: a survey of cupressaceous trees (Hoffman and Arnold, 2010 Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 76: 4063-4075, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety) and one species of tropical grasses (Marquez et al., 2007 Science 315: 513-515). Desnò et al. (2014 ISME J. 8: 257-270, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety) describe the existence of more than one species of bacteria residing within a fungal endophyte. It has been demonstrated that at least one of these endofungal bacteria is able to produce a plant hormone that enhances plant growth and others can produce substances with anti-cancer and anti-malaria properties (Hoffman et al., 2013 PLOS One 8: e73132; Jung and Arnold, 2012 The Effects of Endohyphal Bacteria on Anti-Cancer and Anti-Malaria Metabolites of Endophytic Fungi, Honors Thesis, University of Arizona, incorporated herein by reference in their entirety). However, these complex endophytes have not been shown to exist in cultivated plants of agricultural importance such as maize, soybean, wheat, cotton, rice, etc. As such, the complex endophytes, or bacteria isolated from such complex endophytes, have not previously been conceived as a viable mechanism to address the need to provide improved yield and tolerance to environmental stresses for plants of agricultural importance.
Thus, there is a need for compositions and methods of providing agricultural plants with improved yield and tolerance to various biotic and abiotic stresses. Provided herein are novel compositions of complex endophytes, formulations of complex endophytes for treatment of plants and plant parts, novel complex endophyte-plant compositions, and methods of use for the same, created based on the analysis of the key properties that enhance the utility and commercialization of a complex endophyte composition.